There was one attribute of the old-time garden, one part of nature's economy, which added much to its charm--it was the crowding abundance, the over-fulness of leaf, bud, and blossom. Nature there displayed no bare expanses of naked soil, as in some too-carefully-kept modern parterres; the dull earth was covered with a tangle of ready-growing, self-sowing, lowly flowers, that filled every space left unoccupied by statelier garden favorites, and crowded every corner with cheerful, though unostentatious, bloom. And the close juxtaposition, and even intermingling, of flowers with herbs, vegetables, and fruits gave a sense of homely simplicity and usefulness, as well as of beauty. The soft, purple eyes of the mourning-bride were no less lovely to us in "our garden" because they opened under the shade of currant and gooseberry bushes; and the sweet alyssum and candytuft were no less honey-sweet. The delicate, pinky-purple hues of the sweet peas were not dimmed by their vivid neighbors at the end of the row of poles--the scarlet runners. The adlumia, or mountain fringe, was a special vine of our own and known by a special name--virgin's bower. With its delicate leaves, almost as beautiful as a maidenhair fern, and its dainty pink flower, it festooned the ripening corn as wantonly and luxuriantly as it encircled the snowball and lilac bushes. Though "colored herbs" were cultivated in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as carefully as were flowers,--striped hollies, variegated myrtles, and bays being the gardener's pride,--yet in our old American gardens few plants were grown for their variegated or odd-colored foliage. The familiar and ever-present ribbon-grass, also called striped grass, canary grass, and gardener's garters,--whose pretty expanded panicles formed an almost tropical effect at the base of the garden hedge; the variegated wandering jew, the striped leaves of some varieties of day-lilies; the dusty-miller, with its "frosty pow" (which was properly a house plant), fill the short list. The box was the sole evergreen. And may I not enter here a plea for the preservation of the box-edgings of our old garden borders? I know they are almost obsolete--have been winter-killed and sunburned--and are even in sorry disrepute as having a graveyard association, and as being harborers of unpleasant and unwelcome garden visitors. One lover of old ways thus indignantly mourns their passing:-- "I spoke of box-edgings. We used to see them in little country gardens, with paths of crude earth. Nowadays, it has been discovered that box harbours slugs, and we are beginning to have beds with tiled borders, while the walks are of asphalt. For a pleasure-ground in Dante's _Inferno_ such materials might be suitable."